Martin Ling has insisted that no decision has been made over the long-term future of Leyton Orient’s academy.

However, Orient’s director of football explained the growing constraints that the academy is having to work under, with the O’s facing the prospect of losing all their funding from the Football League next year, should they not gain promotion from the National League.

The O’s academy has a rich history of producing young talent and a number of youngsters were handed regular game time by head coach Justin Edinburgh last season.

Dan Happe was named as the O’s Young-Player-of-the-Year after an impressive campaign which saw him make 32 appearances in all competitions, while fellow academy graduates like Myles Judd, Josh Koroma and Sam Ling all featured regularly during the season.

It seems like there is still a vast array of talent coming through the club’s academy as well, with Orient’s u18s winning the Merit League Two Division last month after beating Plymouth Argyle, while youngster Charles Clayden also made his first team debut on the final day of the campaign against Gateshead.

While Ling is still keen to invest in the academy, the 51-year-old explained the problems Orient could face in the future should they remain in the National League and with the new Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) when he spoke to the Guardian Series two weeks ago.

He said: “Out of our 23-man squad, we probably have six players who have come through the academy which is a quarter of the squad, which is good going. It’s always produced players. Since the new rules of EPPP, the money you make out of your academy is a lot less, even if you’re in the league because with EPPP, it works out a formula for players to go. So that is one of the areas we are worried about.

“The second area is that last year, we had full funding. The Football League fully funded us during the first year out of the league. This year, we have got half funding. Last year we would have had to find half of the money, but this year we will have to find three quarters of the money. A year after, we will have to find all the money so we will have to look at where best our money is spent and we’ve got to look at whether it’s best spent in our academy.

“The biggest problem out of all of it is that as from the summer next year, we have no protection. So, we have 108 boys across the road from the age of 9 upwards. At the moment, each of them has a value on them so if a club wanted to take them, we could ask for compensation. As of next summer, we’ve got no compensation at all, so a club at any time can just pick any of our players and we’ve got no compensation. You’re pushed outside of the boundaries of the Football League.

“We’ve got to look at whether we look at developing a player for three or four years which a club at any time can take for nothing. That’s the sort of thing we’ve got to look at. We’ve made no decisions. We’ve got to access what is right for this football club going forward. But there’s been no decision at this moment in time.”